Lady Smiling (Portrait of Alphonsine Fournaise)

Just a year before this, in 1874, Renoir and his friends had put on the first Impressionist exhibition, and the critics were not kind. Here he is in 1875 trying the loose, open-air touch not on a landscape but on a face. The sitter is Alphonsine Fournaise, then in her late twenties, the eldest daughter of the man who ran a riverside inn at Chatou, a boating spot on the Seine that the new railway had put within easy reach of Paris. Renoir stayed there often, and years later he would paint his famous Luncheon of the Boating Party on its balcony, with Alphonsine leaning on the railing. In this small portrait her features are barely drawn, softened into the background, and the eye goes straight to the big frilled white scarf set against her blue jacket. She sat for him several times. She lived on until 1937, outlasting almost everyone who had gathered at her father's tables.